[zkms]

> It's trivial to find people inside your echo-chamber being well-behaved --- this doesn't answer what a platform's moral responsibility is to society.

I am not a Republican, Tom Cotton is incredibly far away from anything which could be considered my "echo chamber", and I never claimed he was well-behaved.

I chose him specifically to make the specific and narrow point that even brazenly political actors were careful to explicitly distinguish between accidental/unintentional release and an intentional release; and also made clear that "intentional release" was the possibility they regarded as least likely. This was in response to the comment I replied to, whose author said "I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china".

I think most people -- political leaders and otherwise -- are perfectly capable of distinguishing between "high-risk research goes tragically wrong" and "a bioweapon was released on purpose".

If anything, these hamhanded efforts (equating a prosaic "people and/or equipment messed up" scenario to "intentional release of bioweapon", making spurious accusations of racism, claiming that the case for a natural origin is ironclad, government agencies refusing to hand over relevant documents to Senators with the right to see them, etc) to censor discussion and impede investigation of the former has fueled incredibly noxious conspiratorial thinking.